Tuesday, September 3, 2012
Welcome to our blog!
For those of you who haven’t received our first few emails, we are
living in Metro Manila in Marikina City, just east of Quezon City. Fritz is doing some of his research at Ateneo
de Manila University, five blocks and 90 stairs away. We are still adjusting to jet lag and have
spent the first few days settling into our new neighborhood.
This morning we headed over to the Save-More grocery store
to pick up the remaining items we ran out of gusto to purchase on yesterday’s
shopping extravaganza at the enormous five-store Robinson’s Metro East
mall. Manila is huge on huge malls. Adjacent to Robinson’s was the even more
grandiose Santa Lucia mall. Back to this
umaga (morning), we were greeted at Save-More with a Chipmunk’s Christmas song
followed by Beyonce’s rendition of Silent Night and several other Christmas
songs. After loading up our cart with plastic
storage containers, a glass quart tea jar, and pickled papaya, we passed by
purple ube sio-pao and decided to try them.
**Sio-pao, a steamed dumpling filled with pork, chicken, or
some other meat mélange, have been our mild way into Filipino fare. We
first experimented first evening with the adobo Chow-pao—not to be confused
with the identically pronounced sio-pao, also offered on their menu, at Chow
King, one of the many pan-Asian fast food chains. After Fritz was surprised to learn his lechon
meal yesterday at Robinson’s was in fact a serving of deep fried pure pork
belly fat roughly the size of a generous slice of Texas Toast instead of the more
conservative piece of grilled pork he was anticipating, we set out to find
another sio-pao or Chow-pao. We found
the Wha-Pao order window and shared one spicy chicken Wha-Pao mini. Returning to today’s story…
When we passed the take and bake sio-pao freezer at
Save-More this morning we were immediately curious to steam our own at
home. We settled on the meatless purple
ube sio-pao. They steamed up nicely in
the top level of our rice cooker and we enjoyed them as dessert to our lunch of
leftover beans and rice, cucumber salad, and yellow watermelon.
We met with Shyl, the administrative assistant in the IPC
(Institute of Philippine Culture) office, today at Ateneo after lunch and
completed the necessary paperwork to remain in the Philippines beyond 21
days. We stopped off at the Ateneo pool before
heading home for the night. The Ateneo
swim team was practicing but the coaches were kind enough to let us use lane
one. On our descent of the 90 stairs
back down to Barangka and our BCC apartment in pleasant temperature around 70
degrees we were all smiles at how smooth the transition to Philippines has been
for us thus far. The workers at the BCC
(Barangka Credit Cooperative), the coop that owns our apartment building have
been so generous to us in showing us the neighborhood. Shyl was incredibly helpful to us at IPC this
afternoon, working to finagle access for me to the Ateneo campus so I can join
Fritz. Faith, the former tenant of our
little studio continues to email us Manila tips and connect us to other
scholars currently conducting research in the Philippines. As I’m typing this post, Fritz is reading me
a new email from the daughter of a coworker of Fritz’s grandfather inviting us
to her home. And, our families have so
diligent in responding to our emails with updates on U.S. life and curiosity
for our new routine here. We love and
miss you all, but also feel so blessed with our first week on the other side of
the world.
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